A new Account Updater — for buying in real time

June 6, 2018

3 minutes

Recover up to 10% of involuntary churn with Real Time Account Updater for Visa and Mastercard.

With smartphones, people buy everywhere. They shop while talking to friends at home, between meetings at work, or while watching TV. They may add items to a shopping cart on three different devices before finally purchasing on a fourth. Smart merchants invest heavily to make this journey friction-free.

But this ideal experience can suddenly fall apart when the shopper’s payment card is declined. Cards routinely expire, are lost, stolen, or transferred to another bank. This happens to more than six percent of credit and debit cards on file every month. Suddenly, one-click buying turns into a shopper with a card in one hand, phone in the other, pecking out 16 digits on a tiny keyboard. Or worse, they give up and abandon the cart.

More revenue, by the millisecond

Adyen’s Real Time Account Updater solves this headache. For decades, subscription companies like Netflix have relied on traditional Account Updater technology, which ensures subscribers’ card numbers are up to date so they don’t miss the latest episode of "Orange is the New Black."

With a predictable billing schedule, the batch process worked fine to keep accounts up to date. But omni-retailers, game developers, and sharing-economy businesses need instant account updates to keep up with customers that might return every hour, every day, or every other year. Real Time Account Updater refreshes card details at the time of a customer’s transaction, enabling a new generation of businesses to recover 10% of invalid card declines.

How Real Time Account Updater works

Adyen built Real Time Account Updater directly into payment authorizations. For a card-on-file business, the merchant simply makes a payment request, and then Adyen requests and swaps account updates from Visa and Mastercard in the authorization before sending the information to the issuing bank.

If you are tokenized with Adyen, no integration is required. Companies with their own card vaults only need to pick up Account Updater responses.

The results are stunning

Adyen’s Real Time Account Updater has been able to recover more than 6% of AVS and Do Not Honor declines, 11% of expired card declines, and 24% of invalid card declines. The yield on Account Updater matches is huge: a merchant has a 43% chance of turning a decline into an approval with an update. One large Adyen merchant using Real Time Account Updater has seen more than 16% of its Invalid Card, Expired Card, and Generic Declines (including Do Not Honor) recovered.

Even subscription merchants currently using standard batch Account Updater services see up to 1% more declines recovered. Real Time Account Updater eliminates the two-day response time from a batch updater, which increases both the quantity and validity of available account updates.

Where Real Time Account Update is available

Real Time Account Updater is available in the US and Canada for Visa cards, and globally for participating Mastercard issuing banks. Key countries where Mastercard has mandated issuers to participate in Account Updater include the United Kingdom, Italy, Ireland, Germany, Switzerland, and Brazil, with more countries added every quarter. Contact Adyen for the latest list.

If having the most current card information is key to your business, get in touch to see how Real Time Account Updater can boost your revenue.